Exchange Monitoring and Exchange Mailhub questions

I have two questions regarding to exchange, i'm sure many people already know the answer. Any suggestion will be greatly appreciated.

1) any tool that can help to monitor exchange realtime activities such as number of e-mail sent and received. Any free tools or commercial tool would be fine

2) i'm setting up the e-mail infratructure using mailhub design. I plan to use either sendmail or qmail as the mailhub to distribute incoming mails to different mail servers in different subdomains. Our environment is not 100% exchange. We have Suse Openexchange, some qmail servers running POP and IMAP. My question here is, does exchange have the capability to act as the mailhub for the mixed environment liket this. If it does, how do I implement it?

Who is Participating?

1. There are free tools, but they arent going to be as good as pay tools. Perfmon has objects that will tell you this. All of this data is stored in the tracking log and is readily availble to be parsed by a custom script or tool.

Here is a list of pretty much all of them. NetIQ is by far the leader there:

2. Yes, but you would be better off running sendmail/qmail. Those products are more in tuned to routing and have robust queuing engines with greater flexibility. If you use Exchange, you will need an address space under recipient policies for each smtp address you support. That's if you want to support those addresses inside and outside your Exchange org. You could also configure connecting hosts to relay in your SMTP virtual server settings. You would then create an SMTP connector for each route, adding the email domain as an address space in the connector. I can go into much greater detail if necessary.

OneHump

0

vayohaAuthor Commented: 2004-03-26

Thanks So much for your response. I think you are right. I'd be better off with sendmail/qmail. It's cleaner and faster for routing. Will try those exchange report generator apps. Appreciate it.